


fixed stars (impossibilities)

by triangularium



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Zombies, Angst, Fluff, Getting Together, Heavy Angst, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Miscommunication, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-01
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-09 15:47:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11672187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triangularium/pseuds/triangularium
Summary: Oikawa and Iwaizumi are seventeen when the future reveals itself to be an inevitable dead end. Seventeen when schools and workplaces close permanently, international economies collapse, entire families disappear. Seventeen when the world turns into a graveyard of the unquiet dead.Seventeen when they run out of time.





	fixed stars (impossibilities)

**Author's Note:**

> I recommend listening to Hans Zimmer's [_Time_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcKGN_lTdyM) from the movie _Inception_ while you're reading this. I had it on loop while I was writing even though it took _forever_ for the words to come out (background music tends to distract me more often than not, but in this case, it was apparently beneficial).

“Compared to this eternal body, the individual was a smoke, a cloud. The body was the only reality. I hurt, therefore I am.”

\-  _ White Oleander _ (Janet Fitch)

 

They are swimming in rivers of blood.

 

Iwaizumi tastes the coppery tang in the air, twitches at the distant discomfort of drying tightness on his skin, still in that transitory phase between viscous -- alive -- and flaky, flyaway crimson crust. A life withering away to dust when exposed to the elements.

 

His vision has narrowed to points, parts of an accordion that expand and contract intermittently in irregular tides.

 

A fiery burning in his left leg. It had twisted in an odd direction after they’d jumped out the window of a two-story hospital building a few days ago (or was it weeks? temporal perception meant nothing here). Even though it should have healed by now, in times of extreme stress, the phantom pain in his kneecap returns with a vengeance.

 

(“At least we match now,” Oikawa jokes, a quicksilver half-smile darting across his face, light as cirrus clouds. “We’ll find a white brace for you, too, and when this is over, when we’re back on the court --”

 

_ we’ll be two sides of the same coin, sliding down a storm drain _

 

Which one is Iwaizumi?

 

“Tails, of course!” An empty smirk masking an unfathomable ocean of emotions.

 

Iwaizumi doesn’t have the heart to tell him that without a deus ex machina, they won’t serve, set, or spike a volleyball again.

 

That they will be lucky to watch another sunrise.)

 

Rotting flesh. Movies show you what it looks like but don’t prepare you for the saccharine, festering odor -- like wilting flowers under sweltering sunlight, and as sudden and heavy as a car on the freeway losing control and veering into the median, city lights blinking out all over the world in a synchronized wave, or strolling into a quiet, abandoned house on a supply run to find the tableau of peace disturbed by legions of the dormant undead.

 

Chaos.

 

There is a body in the corner of the living room, draped by an old woman with green, moldy sores on her cheeks and dentures for teeth. In another world, she would be someone’s harmless grandmother.

 

Brown tufts of hair (unstyled as of late), a flicker of adrenaline.

 

He’s lost track of Makki, Mattsun, his parents, but he instinctively knows where Shittykawa is. Always.

 

Iwaizumi swings the axe that has become his new best friend ( _ well, second-best _ ) at a clawing arm that reaches towards Oikawa’s red-spattered teal shirt.

 

“How many?” he ekes out hoarsely, tears unshed clogging his throat like gritty sand.

 

“Two o’clock.”

 

A non sequitur, but he’s used to interpreting Oikawa’s idiosyncrasies, the little signs and symbols that mean back attack and libero toss. They exchange conversations and warnings in the frequency of eyelid flickers, the minute tensing of muscles.

 

He hacks at the seemingly endless horde of limbs before him, lips pressed into a thin line, ignoring the minor explosions of maggots and unidentifiable chunks of meat accompanying his progress.

 

They’re pressed back to back, a warmth solid and real against him. The only proof that he hasn’t gone insane.

 

Silence, after an interminable period.

 

Nothing moves.

 

Iwaizumi nudges a mass of intestines contemplatively, alert to dull moans and abrupt jerks.

 

“Let’s go, Crappykawa,” he lets his arms drop wearily as he turns around, a warrior trudging from a battlefield with a sword that drags across stone. A distinctive scraping (he ignores). His first mistake. “We’ve found the painkillers you were searching for.”

 

“Iwa --!”

 

Choking. Dilated pupils. Terror.

 

He follows Oikawa’s line of sight to his right forearm.

 

There is no pain.

 

He jabs at the edges, the vacancy where muscle used to be, halfheartedly, and sees trickles, pools in indentations, sluggish spurts.

 

It’s deep. They need a poultice.

 

Mentally, he’s calculating the length of his shirt he’ll need to rip off to staunch the flow, the time it will take for platelets to scab over the wound to a satisfactory extent, so every brush doesn’t re-open his insides.

 

Solving problems, saving Oikawa ( _ the world, his world _ ). All in a day’s work.

 

It’s what he does.

 

( _ This isn’t the end. It can’t be. _ )

 

Darkness eclipses the rising sun, rose splashing across the ruined carpet, blurry hazel very close to him refracting gold prismatically, glitter spilling and melting in tiny bubble universes.

 

He almost laughs.

 

There is no pain.

 

***

 

“Zero out of ten,” Oikawa says decisively as he eats pinto beans out of the can, stirring mulishly by the crackling fire.

 

Iwaizumi raises an eyebrow and continues wolfing down his portion.

 

“Do you really want to be cooking from now on?” he threatens. The wan light softens the angles of his expression, but it also underscores the hollows. It is difficult to match this starved, gaunt statue to the figure of Aoba Johsai’s star ace, but there is a resemblance in the stiff, determined tilt of the mouth, the carbon glint in dark eyes that had consistently been present but is now chiseled and polished to diamond (survivor).

 

Oikawa backtracks immediately, chastised.

 

“I meant our living situation.”

 

“Yeah, I get it. I’m convinced that one day I’m going to wake up and find myself in the loony bin because you’ve put me there.”

 

“Iwa-chaaaan!” Oikawa slurs, whiny and unable to find a suitable retort. For a moment, things revert to Before. “Of all the people, why do I have to be stuck in this nightmare with such a... meanie!”

 

An unoppressive break in conversation. Oikawa seems strangely introspective, collecting beans from the bottom and letting them slip off the spoon and into the gravy in patterns only he can interpret.

 

“Some religious groups said this was hell,” Iwaizumi tentatively bridges the gap, leaning back into the secondhand sofa, falling into a memory of breakfast cereal and a panicked CNN newscaster. “A lot of crap about Judgment Day, sinners, penitence, and another mass plague. That God had cursed us because we’d failed to live up to his expectations.”

 

Oikawa laughs sharply, the sound serrated like glass shattering against concrete.

 

“Hell? God? But then again, who really knows? I thought extraterrestrial contact was more likely than an epidemic creating zombies. Like something out of a bad horror flick.”

 

Iwaizumi’s leg is growing steadily more numb under the dead weight of Oikawa’s. Their toes entwine, entangle, settling into unoccupied grooves, slotting puzzle pieces of starry sky. Revolving binary black holes.

 

(Math homework in the library, partly cloudy. Shadows lengthen over derivatives and pencil shavings. The bridge of Oikawa’s nose is dusted with pink -- the herald of a perpetual autumn cold, and he drums his fingers on the study table softly

 

_ slender, well-maintained pianist fingers _

 

tapping out 

 

          the rhythm of jazz, slow and smooth, lime juice oozing down frosted glass and

          slipping on ice -- serpentine

 

_           Nero _ , black-tie concerts, and nighttimes on Coruscant illuminated by the haloes of

          four moons

 

“I don’t understand this proof,” Iwaizumi interrupts the regular, light scratch-scratch of Oikawa’s pencil as it glides down binder paper ( _ perfect handwriting _ ) in a display of sedulous care. He slides L’hopital’s rule over the wood and waits for an explanation, absently doodling alien heads with deceptively feathery ( _ gelled _ ) Oikawa hair in the margins.

 

“Iwa-chan needs help on a math problem?” Oikawa stares in faux shock, dramatically swooning in his chair, “Now, I can finally be of use!”

 

“Shut up and  _ show me _ .”

 

“Fine.” A pout. “You have no appreciation of artistry, Iwa.”

 

“All I saw was a trash-level performance, but if you need a consolation to sleep at night...”

 

“Ouch!” Oikawa yelps, pressing a hand to his heart, and Iwaizumi has currently left reality for a position as a full-time actor in a low-quality television drama. The girl studying medicine in an adjacent cubicle hisses out her disapproval, a lizard crawling out from under a rock and into the glaring afternoon. “Either way,” he continues more seriously, murmuring, “you’ve verified the indeterminate form. All you need to do now is repeat L’hopital by taking numerator-denominator derivatives until limit substitution works.”

 

“Thanks,” Iwaizumi replies, surprised that he hadn’t been able to determine the approach. What he would do for something to eat right now...

 

“Let’s go, Iwa-chan,” Oikawa says, packing his bag, brushing pens off the workspace.

 

“Did I say that out loud?”

 

“Starbucks.” Iwaizumi’s favorite place to study, despite being a hub of activity that Oikawa can’t concentrate in. “Your stomach growled.”

 

“But how are you going to finish your assignment?” It’s a valid question ( _ due tomorrow _ ).

 

Oikawa smiles, a flash of teeth. “Don’t worry so much; it only leads to frown lines and wrinkles.”

 

Twin, fusing solar systems racing across dark fields.

 

Iwaizumi shoves his papers into his backpack with restrained excitement, burying his sketch of Alien Tooru for later.)

 

“You know,” starts Oikawa dreamily, head cushioned on Iwaizumi’s shoulder and fingers plastered to the skin under his shirt. Iwaizumi merely sighs, resigned to an octopus grip tonight and blinking dirt out of his eyes to find that he doesn’t remember where Oikawa ends and he begins. “Maybe we’re Vikings.”

 

“What?”

 

(and just as he thinks he’s starting to unravel what makes Oikawa Tooru tick, things like this throw him off, and he wonders, perhaps, if any person could truly comprehend another at all)

 

“Fight for our lives during the day, relax and make merry at night, wait for the apocalypse. Rinse and repeat. A twisted Valhalla.”

 

Iwaizumi considers it.

 

“You’ve stretched that analogy so thin that it’s transparent. Valhalla’s a sort of heaven according to Norse mythology, isn’t it? Also, mornings don’t bring us back to square one, fully healed. Wherever we are, we’re still human.”

 

_ And we’re still together. _

 

***

 

Iwa-chan might as well be a corpse for how useful he’s being, making everything difficult by dragging his feet on the ground, slipping from Oikawa’s back, jeans wrapping around brambles and refusing to relinquish their grip without creating crackling noises that will attract every walker in the vicinity for miles.

 

A corpse. Oikawa’s phrasing hits him, a freight truck of tactlessness, and he digs his fingers into Iwaizumi’s wrist, counting pulses. A heartbeat dimmed by unconsciousness.

 

He lets himself think, out of the haze of blind panic from three miles ago.

 

(after clocks stop, you measure time by changes in location --  _ dx _ )

 

Iwaizumi has been bitten, he admits clinically in the safety of his head, scrambling to rationalize, logic his way out. Rats trapped in a maze with no exit under harsh lamplight, surrounded by impersonal white labcoats.

 

Iwaizumi Hajime is going to die.

 

They stumble into a clearing, an opening edged by a copse of birch trees. Dust motes hang suspended in the air, and Oikawa reaches weakly out in a futile effort to capture them, steal a small sliver of sunlight to warm his palms. 

 

He lays Iwaizumi down in the center, clammy, sweating, and feverish. Unsettled dreaming, aborted tosses and turns.

 

A dewy spiderweb strung between two blades of grass, a wet, sugary breeze. Long stripes of yellow coating the ground, nearly tangible enough to lick. Summer lemonade and laundry detergent.

 

He waits for him to open his eyes.

 

Meanwhile, their slice of afterlife. An island of Ma’at on the horizon, born of a tempestuous sea.

 

Oikawa is composed of computer chips, crumpled red Solo cups, and Tokyo skylines, but he feels a lukewarm enjoyment here, ensconced in the insistent buzzing of cicadas, the hurried flapping of birds roosting in canopies.

 

Iwaizumi shifts again, and Oikawa is irresistibly drawn to him, the tension in his jaw, traces the curves of his cheekbones, the spray of freckles at his collarbone. In the glade, his hair is bleached almost white. His fingers calloused -- larger, thicker, and stronger than Oikawa’s own.

 

Blood seeps through the makeshift bandage. Iwaizumi will never win an arm wrestling competition again. Oikawa can visualize what he will see if he unwraps and redresses the injury.

 

_ Schrodinger’s cat _ , he reasons.

 

Out of sight, out of mind.

 

***

 

“Do you think the ocean is safe? Ponds? Lakes?” he asks, when communication infrastructure crumbles.

 

They are miles from familiarity.

 

Iwaizumi curls those powerful, gentle fingers around his shoulder, a vise.

 

“Maybe.” A non-answer. He doesn’t mention a radio transmission dated a few weeks back about cruise ships stalled and stagnant along their routes, thousands of tons of putrid carcasses.

 

“We should go to the beach,” Practically imperceptible dimples. Ignorance is bliss. “We can pick up beach volleyball and have the surf to ourselves.”

 

Dead bodies float.

 

***

 

“What do you think they’re doing right now?”

 

“Who?”

 

Apparently, Iwaizumi is the new Google. However, in this case, he knows exactly what Oikawa is talking about. He simply doesn’t want to acknowledge it.

 

Their acquaintances. Friends. Family. The lost.

 

People who had gone missing after instances of the virus escaped quarantine in earnest.

 

Although they once lived in the future, the misty grey of infinite opportunity and question marks ( _ Nationals, college, a job, lovers _ ), the present consists of ghosts of the past. Instincts and memories. Faded photographs stored in boxes in the attics of their minds.

 

“Tobio-chan, Chibi-chan, Ushiwaka...,” Oikawa trails off.

 

Makki, Mattsun, the Aoba Johsai team, their relatives. Landmines. Iwaizumi tiptoes around them delicately, the muffled tinkling of chimes and welcome mats, Oikawa-san’s cheerful beam that was so reminiscent of her son’s.

 

“They’re probably doing as well as we are, Oikawa. Just trying to avoid zombies, live to die another day.”

 

“What if we’re the only ones left, Iwa?”

 

The last people on Earth. It scares him, but Oikawa doesn’t want a realistic answer. He wants someone to hug him, cradle him, reassure him that everything will be all right, that this is a test or some elaborate prank. Or perhaps he wants a romantic confession, standing in the place where the world is no more, watching the clouds scud across the heavens fearfully, hiding.

 

Well, he shouldn’t have chosen Iwaizumi then.

 

“I hope not. If the aliens finally arrive and find us, you certainly won’t be a positive representation of the human race.”

 

***

 

Iwaizumi sits up in bed, ramrod straight, the covers pooling around him as his ears strain for the slightest sound.

 

Shuffling. A disembodied groan.

 

Is someone sick?

 

He unplugs the lamp and grabs the steel neck in case the culprit is an intruder.

 

Blinking. The digital clock in the hallway reads 2:23 A.M. Why would his family be awake now?

 

He lifts his foot from the ground, but there is some sticky resistance. Gummy, but greater surface area.

 

He touches the light switch wedged into a recess in the wall but quickly pulls his hand away, instinctively suspicious of the pervasive quiet ( _ the calm before the storm _ ). After years of volleyball training, he is nothing if not a devout follower of his sixth sense when observation and analysis fail to yield a satisfactory answer.

 

A part of his brain ( _ the Oikawa part _ , he thinks snidely) is having an anxiety attack, radiating a constant stream of expletives and unhelpful advice. He tamps it down, locks the feelings into a cardboard moving box labeled “will deal with later.”

 

He is a master of procrastination.

 

He is not safe.

 

A hand grabs him by the back of his neck and forcibly turns him around.

 

Long, sleep-mussed hair, eyes dark with agony, skin pale and white as a sheet. Cool, but alive. He gulps the stunned shout back down his throat.

 

“Mom?” A whisper in the blue-lit hallway. Her focus appears to flicker for a moment ( _ take me someplace nice _ ), but they’ve planned for this. They didn’t believe that the day would arrive so soon.

 

The parting of the ways.

 

“Where’s Dad?”

 

His mother glances down and attempts to affix her appendix to its usual position, but it slips and slides away from her.

 

He realizes what the fluid coating the ground is. A quagmire of feelings that could drag him down with her -- puking, crying, and laughing crazily ( _ this can’t be the truth _ ).

 

“Listen to me, Hajime,” she bites out, sweat beading above her upper lip. “Find Tooru. Keep running.”

 

_ What about you? _ Iwaizumi wants to ask, but some questions are better off unanswered.

 

“If you follow only one guideline I’ve taught you, let it be this one.”

 

“Yes, Mom,” Iwaizumi’s lips tremble and he breathes in, struggling to maintain his shaky composure. I don’t want to leave you ( _ alone _ ).

 

_ I love you _ , he sends messages in Morse code between the air that separates them.  _ Come with me. _

 

The shake of her head --  _ your father _ . Iwaizumi thinks he understands (he doesn’t, not yet).

 

“I’ll delay them. Go, now.”

 

He doesn’t look back, even when he stops hearing the asymmetric thumping of bare feet, the tearing of an arm from its socket, and the terrifying, animalistic screeches of the damned.

 

***

 

“What are we going to do, Hajime?” Oikawa rocks from side to side, Iwaizumi’s head nestled in his lap.

 

The forest and the prospect of approaching nightfall bear down upon them forbiddingly.

 

“What are we going to do?”

 

***

 

It happens all at once.

 

Iwaizumi is reluctantly yanked into wakefulness by a pounding headache, shaking cobwebs from the nooks and crannies of his blissfully blank thoughts.

 

Unfortunately, Oikawa is simultaneously leaning down to peer at his face, so they collide midway. The migraine doubles in intensity, and Iwaizumi lets a displeased grunt exit his mouth.

 

“What did you think you were doing, Trashkawa?”

 

“Do you have to come up with a new nickname every time? And here I was hoping that you’d suffered some type of temporary amnesia so that I could charm you into calling me by my first name!”

 

Oikawa turns his nose up imperiously and looks away. For someone who can’t spend five minutes without talking and inserting his own opinion into a conversation, he can be awful at communication, Iwaizumi judges, but not without a distinct fondness. The elephant in the room.

 

“So,” he clears his throat, equally relieved and disappointed that Oikawa seems to be unharmed and intact. This is uncharted territory that he will be venturing into on his own. It’s unusually nice to be a few steps ahead of his scheming friend for once. “How long has it been?”

 

Oikawa purses his lips nervously and hedges.

 

“I don’t have a watch, Iwa-chan.”

 

Iwaizumi’s hazy vision sharpens into a pointed glare. Of course, this isolated idyll, dessicated maple leaves spiraling down around them like snowflakes, couldn’t remain untainted by Oikawa’s irreverence for long.

 

“About six hours,” he says finally. “You haven’t eaten. I’ve saved those for you.”

 

There is a pile of berries, turgid with maroon juice, next to him.

 

“I have one hour to live,” Iwaizumi utters, raising his palm and pressing it towards the blue above, as though he can chase the sun, push and pull it in various directions like warm taffy, with the hands of a man. A year ago, before he turned seventeen, he’d been bright and elated, on the cusp of a new chapter, optimistic of his trajectory.

 

Volleyball or medicine? Pop music or classical? Rap? Studying abroad? Research or a part-time job?

 

Choices, a million doors.

 

And Oikawa, who occasionally gazed at him as though he held the keys to them all.

 

_ I have one hour to live. _

 

The words echo in his head endlessly, reverberating. The ticking of a clock. Unwinding time until the New Year, and dry, chapped lips smacking against his own ungracefully (his first kiss).

 

“Kiss me  _ back _ next time, Iwa-chan!”

 

No reaction. Downcast.

 

“Is there someone else?”

 

_ Silly Tooru. There was never room for anyone else but you. _

 

If he has one hour ( _ sixty minutes, three thousand and six hundred seconds _ ), he would wish to spend every last one with Oikawa.

 

***

 

“Remember that time you dared me to stick ice cubes in our senpai’s training shorts?”

 

“Oh, yeah!” Oikawa snickers, concealing his mouth with the back of his hand. Iwaizumi tugs it down, closer, and a giggle remains half-finished. The palm to his chest (feel his heartbeat while he has one).

 

Oikawa’s fingers are thin, bony now, and the ridges of the joints are rough and cracked without his favorite lotion. Shea butter. He kept a bottle on his nightstand next to his nail file, stroking and massaging his wrists whenever he was particularly worried.

 

Still beautiful. Always beautiful.

 

( _ so beautiful that it almost hurts to behold him, like falling straight into the sun _ )

 

Iwaizumi tips his chin upward, expecting to see Oikawa spacing out, staring at miniature galaxies in clumps of dandelions and weeds, pollen lightweight in motion. Traveling. Better or worse -- a precious few routes cater to the fragility of a growing plant, leading to survival while the others are dead ends of waste and concrete.

 

Oikawa is contemplative, mapping out the planes of Iwaizumi’s skull, outlining spikes of hair frizz that curl inward -- prominences and flares.

 

“You never did complete that dare.”

 

“I would have gotten caught!”

 

“No, you wouldn’t. I was keeping watch! Don’t you trust me?”

 

( _ with my life _ )

 

“What was the penalty anyway?”

 

Oikawa, musingly. “You were supposed to go out with me.”

 

Iwaizumi swallows, feeling his Adam’s apple bob. The meadow and they occupy different dimensions that nevertheless exist at the same time; the bee buzzing faintly near him is separated by a chasm too wide to breach.

 

Iwaizumi and Oikawa. Oikawa and Iwaizumi. They orbit each other, the vicissitudes of celestial bodies. If one ceases to exist, collapsing inward in a brilliant supernova, the remainder will shoot forth aimlessly into a starless void.

 

“We never did go on that date, did we?” Oikawa sniffles. He’s a silent crier, and Iwaizumi reaches curiously to wipe the tears into salt that trails down his thumb.

 

( _ We just... missed each other. Two ships sailing blindly past each other in the night. _ )

 

Iwaizumi laughs and laughs and laughs.

 

“I think we’ve been going on dates since before we even knew what they really were.”

 

***

 

Thirty minutes, a countdown, a bomb timer on a bullet train as it speeds through a tunnel. Whiteness ahead.

 

“I know this isn’t typical, and that it’s highly delayed, but -- um, I would -- you -- will you go out with me?”

 

Oikawa tracks his stuttering with unhidden amusement.

 

“Eloquent, Iwa-chan! Ouch! Why are you so violent with me? I haven’t seen you flustered before; I’m making the most of it. Also, aren’t we already outside?”

 

( _ yes, yes, yes _ )

 

***

 

Twenty minutes.

 

“So, Iwa-chan, does this mean we’re boyfriends?”

 

Iwaizumi cringes.

 

“You’ll have to stop calling me ‘Iwa-chan’ then.”

 

“What? Do you want me to say ‘Iwaizumi’? It’s so long and unwieldy!”

 

“No. Hajime.”

 

“Haji-chan. Hajime-chan. Ha-chan. It doesn’t have the same ring to it.”

 

“I suppose you’ll be Idiot-kawa then.”

 

“ _ Hajime _ .”

 

“ _ Tooru _ .”

 

“Say it again. Except louder and breathier, like we’ve just finished practice --”

 

“No.”

 

***

 

Five.

 

The rustle of undergrowth not extremely far off.

 

Oikawa tenses visibly, a natural fight-or-flight response.

 

“You should leave,” Iwaizumi exhales. He’s burning up. Wrapped around Oikawa ( _ lovely, despicable, human _ ), he is attempting to hold a shooting star at his fingertips. It is destroying him.

 

“And go where?”

 

“Anywhere. Elsewhere.”

 

“Wherever it is, we’ll go there when you’re better.”

 

“I’m not going to survive this, Tooru!” Iwaizumi snaps, irrationally angry. Bloodlust and brutality are rewiring his brain. “Get that through that thick brick you call a head!”

 

“Bite me.”

 

“You can’t mean what I think you said.”

 

“I want you to.”

 

“You don’t know what you’re asking for.”

 

“I know perfectly well what I want.”

 

“No, you don’t! Why are you asking me to kill you?”

 

“Because that’s what I did to you by not being three seconds faster so that walker couldn’t abscond with a quarter of your arm! However you look at the situation, I’ve doomed you!”

 

“How would you feel if I told you to take that axe and sever my head from my body? That’s my emotional state --”

 

“Hajime.” Terrified, heaving sobs. “Please. What’s the point of all of this without you?”

 

“I’m sorry, Tooru.”

 

( _ for once, I wish you’d walk away _ )

 

***

 

Two.

 

I’ve missed so many chances, Tooru. We didn’t get takeout from that Indian place Makki and Mattsun were raving about. I didn’t confess to you because I was afraid of losing what we had. Frightened to imagine that we could be better with something more. I didn’t get straight A’s in high school, and my mom and I had an argument about playing professional volleyball the night before she sacrificed everything to save me.

 

No regrets? My life is defined by them.

 

But I memorized constellations when we went stargazing on your last birthday, and when we sat on the bales of hay and pointed at the black dome above us, I saw you smile. Not those false, broad grins. A real one. And it was adorable.

 

I got Ushijima’s phone number a couple of weeks before the world decided to go belly up and I was getting around to telling you. He’s human, like the rest of us. Although you likely wouldn’t want to be his friend. He reminds me of Kageyama.

 

And that walker, the one that bit me. I’m glad, you know? That it came at me and not you. I want you to live through this. For me.

 

Get married to a nice person, Tooru. Someone who’s strict and keeps you in line but also makes sure you’re safe. Happy.  _ Loved _ .

 

(don’t forget me)

 

( _ jealous, are you? _ )

 

(obviously! who wouldn’t be?)

 

So when you add up the pluses and minuses... it was worth it, wasn’t it?

 

Shorter than I thought it would be (and I didn’t have high expectations in the first place) but --

 

***

 

Oikawa is lying supine by a large root. Ants march rhythmically past his nose, and his eyelids flutter, gummed with tears.

 

No Iwaizumi to erase them.

 

He’s sprawled across his legs. Stiff. Gelid, as Oikawa touches him experimentally, fleetingly.

 

Rigor mortis.

 

Minutes later, his eyes open, and Oikawa’s joy bubbles over in enthusiastic chatter but

 

          his eyes, they’re

          white?

 

Not white, per se, but...

          clouded and

 

when did he get so close

why is he drooling ( _ Hajime, control yourself; you’re not a dog -- _ )

why does he smell dead ( _ he doesn’t look dead _ )

why are you ripping through my fingers ( _ please, please, please, Hajime, don’t hurt me, have mercy, pleasepleasepleasemakeitend _ )

 

He screams until his best friend wraps an hand around his neck, squeezing, leans close (to mumble a secret), and tears out his vocal cords.

 

( _ i love you. do you love me? i love you _ )

 

***

 

There is no pain.

 

The hummingbirds have flown, leaving invisible imprints in the shape of three-toed feet in the wild grass, floating past displaced air molecules.

 

Two corpses in a yellow wood. One beautiful but slowly rotting its way into oblivion. One an unrecognizable hunk of exposed organs and blood vessels.

 

According to all known laws of biology, there is no way that either should be able to move. They’re  _ dead _ . Non-functional. The zombie, of course, moves anyway. Because zombies don’t care what humans think is impossible.

 

The one that was once Oikawa Tooru awakens to a brave new world.

 

There is a man in the distance, hunched forward, but he is uninteresting because he is not food.

 

He is alone.

 

He is hungry.

 

And he knows he will never be whole.

**Author's Note:**

> I love Oikawa and Iwaizumi. I don't know why I'm doing this to them (and myself). I should write some pure fluff for a change haha.
> 
> Yes, I wrote this fic solely to make a _Bee Movie_ reference at the end (not really). Let me know what you think! Constructive criticism and emotional reactions are welcome. Also, please let me know if you find a typo. :)
> 
> Another song I used as inspiration: [_King and Lionheart_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N30sBDpUR1Q) by Of Monsters and Men.


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